Growing 2 mini tomato and basil in sg9. All seems to be growing well but notice the tomato leaves seems to be folding inwards, not a curling syndrome. Unable to find more info about this online. Any advise from experienced growers here.
Living in tropical Singapore, with temperature about 26-28deg with my air-conditioning being left on. Float Water level is always level or lower.
Hello @aarong88
This is quite common for plants grown in higher temperature and humidity ratios. It’s an indication that plants are under environmental stress. The leaves look nicely dark green as they should and no pests are visible.
What you can check is the roots, if they are nice and white-coloured then they are healthy and doing okay. If not I’d suspect too high moisture levels for pods, that could even mean lowering the water level even more for some time.
Tomato loves warmth but it can get too excessive too. Plants could benefit from a little bit lower temperatures and some air breeze. But they will survive these conditions but some leaves will curl up to cope with heat stress. And that’s okay, they will yield 
Well, I didn’t do much to it or attempted to check the roots. Cos I saw buds growing and it has even flowered. One of the flower is also now fruiting.
There are even suckers growing now. I am just wondering if it’s possible to cut off the suckers to actually clone a new plant. On all forums including gardening one, there seems to be very few people who does it for determinate tomatoes. And most would recommend leave it to allow additional flowers or fruits. I was planning to cut it off and put it into a pot of soil to allow my nephew and nieces experience growing a plant on their own.
Also read that it might be possible that the new cloned plant might not actually flower or fruit. Any advice?
Okay, got it. Then there’s no need to check the roots, as the plant looks healthy for a passive irrigation system or any hydroponics device.
Usually, I would not advise removing the suckers, as there is no need. These ‘suckers’ will grow into stems and can yield too, yes. But here your goal is different and feel free to root it. Another way to propagate it by vegetative propagation is to cut off a top stem and root it in water or in a moist substrate.
Tomatoes are very easy to propagate and will emerge new roots from the stems quickly. When starting tomatoes indoors they can elongate and to lower the height of the desired plants it’s usual to leave the whole stem in the substrate, for it to grow roots from the stem it has.
Real cloning is done in laboratories in vitro, using the pieces of the desired plant to get multiple plants with the same genetics. Very difficult to get results in domestic conditions but if you mean just taking a cutting, and rooting it then it is very common. I haven’t heard that cloned plants might not flower or produce fruits. Plants have this amazing ability to grow any cell they want from single cell. It’s called
totipotency - the ability of a single cell to divide and produce all the differentiated cells in an organism, including extraembryonic tissues .
It’s always the case with propagating - some will live, and some will wither.
Here are some examples. Took cuttings from a mother tomato plant that was growing past the lights and used Grow Anything plugs to root them. The first picture is from a week after I propagated, at first they were stressed and the leaves were a little bit limp. The next two pictures are taken 2 months later with fruits forming on the top.
Wow! My nieces will be in love with this. Thanks so mihc. Makes me more confident to do it.
